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Eleven years ago, Deus Ex was released by Ion Storm and Eidos Interactive
and gaming was forever changed.
Its near-flawless mixture of role-playing elements, first-person shooting,
conspiracy-laden story,
multiple branching paths,
stealth gameplay and cyberpunk aesthetics
made for an experience like nothing before it.
And finally the time has come
for another developer to try their hand
at making another Deus Ex game
with Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
While a lot of people refer to this as Deus Ex 3,
it's actually a prequel to the first game,
set 25 years before in the year 2027.
It takes place in a future that's seeing a renaissance in human advancement,
where the growing industry surrounding biomechanical augmentation is taking place.
You play as Adam Jensen,
an ex-cop turned head of security for one of the largest augmentation companies,
Sarif Industries.
And you know he's hardcore
by his ever-present sunglasses and the way he talks.
I mean, just listen to him.
His voice actor, Elias Toufexis, does an excellent job playing him.
He sounds like a mix between a younger Clint Eastwood and Batman, and it's awesome.
Yes, Adam's character comes off about as emotional
as Keanu Reeves impersonating a Terminator,
but it fits his persona somehow.
The first 15 minutes of the game is dedicated to the in-game tutorial,
where you'll be told how to move around and shoot things,
just like every other first-person shooter on the planet.
Thankfully, you can skip the tutorial videos and messages completely,
which is great, because mandatory tutorials are from the Devil.
Soon enough, Jensen will be smashed to pieces by some seriously bad dudes,
and would die if it were not for him being extensively augmented
with the best Sarif Industries has laying around.
And so sets the stage for the main game,
which consists of you doing pretty much whatever you want
with your new-fangled Inspector Gadget doohickeys.
The game is set up pretty much like the first Deus Ex,
a storyline-driven shooter with role-playing and stealth elements.
You start in a hub somewhere,
usually a city like Detroit or Shanghai,
and you're given a set of objectives to complete.
There's a main quest and along the way
you'll have the opportunity to go on side quests
and the order in which you do these is totally up to you.
Or you can just not do them at all for a while
and go around punching hookers.
The entire core of Deus Ex is player freedom
which leans mainly on four gameplay pillars:
So, I'm just going to start with exploration here.
Like I said, you start off in a hub city
and the whole area is open from the beginning.
You're free to roam about the streets and alleyways,
but you can also enter dozens of buildings.
Some of these will provide things like additional augmentation options or weapon upgrades.
Others will be there only for exploration purposes
and really don't progress the story at all.
Which is just fine.
I love breaking into apartment buildings, roaming the hallways,
sneaking into whatever apartment seems interesting to see what's inside.
Sometimes it'll be nothing;
other times it'll be the hideout of a weapons dealer with tons of sweet loot.
Or it might be the home of a completely random NPC
who you won't actually see in person,
but you can read about their love life through the emails on their computer.
It's little things like this that really add to the atmosphere of the game
and make it feel like you're exploring a real place.
That said, these details make the overall city hubs themselves feel rather empty.
Like, most of the NPCs just kind of stand there doing nothing,
maybe saying an occasional line of dialogue.
There's no cars driving around,
rarely any events going on,
and as much time as you'll spend in these places, it's a glaring issue.
It's like the town's gone to hell when you weren't looking or something.
Well, okay, so this is Detroit,
I guess that's just how it is, but Shanghai?
That's just not right, it's freaking China.
There's, like, 17 billion people there or something.
Still, Detroit is fun to explore, even though it leaves something to be desired,
and I do think the Chinese hubs feel more alive and pleasing.
The next gameplay pillar is combat,
which seems to rub some gamers the wrong way.
It's a first-person game, so you expect it to handle like an FPS.
And when you have guns and ammo, it does.
There's even a cover system in place now which pops the camera out to third-person,
so you can see around corners more easily and it works rather well.
But you'll soon realize that Adam Jensen is actually a delicate little flower
underneath all of that augmentation armor,
and will die if he so much as thinks about getting shot.
That's because this game really isn't about shooting,
unless you augmented the crap out of yourself with augmented shooting crap.
An since that doesn't happen until much later in the game,
some people might just get impatient.
You'll want to take care to plan out your assault,
anticipate which weapons to use,
how much ammo you'll need to use,
choose which augmentations you'll need to activate,
then execute all of this with utmost care.
Otherwise, you'll have a battalion of soldiers and robots after you
sooner than you can say a phrase that
starts with "sooner than you can say."
And since you have a very limited supply of guns and ammo anyways,
you'll really want to choose your fights carefully,
even if you want to augment yourself with dragon skin and Superman strength.
And you can upgrade each of your weapons with things like faster reload,
armor-piercing rounds and silencers,
so it's definitely fun to shoot things
so you can get more weapons
so you can shoot more things.
There's also the option to use augmentations as weapons
which use rechargeable battery life to activate.
You've got stuff like the ever-present cinematic melee takedown button,
which you can use to both silently knock someone out
or go all snap, crack, stabby-stab on them.
Or the Typhoon, which activates a Matrix move of some kind
involving pyrotechnics and pure win.
It just sucks that these suck up so much energy
and that Jensen runs on AA batteries or whatever it is.
I was constantly running out of energy
and sadly it doesn't ever recharge but one bar.
So you'll have to munch on some kind of energy candy to stay charged.
Yeah, superhuman has to chow down on freakin' PowerBars to punch dudes in the face.
How much sense does that make?
I would make an Extreme Rock Climbing joke if it were that kind of day, but it's not.
Next up is stealth,
which is arguably the largest single part of the game,
at least if you're playing how the developers seemed to have wanted you to.
In every mission, there are tons of branching paths all over the place
to take to meet your objectives.
For instance, early on you're tasked with infiltrating the local police station,
which is pretty much suicide if you go in guns blazing.
So, you can crawl into the sewers and hack into the door underneath the station,
or climb over the fence in the back alley and then sneak into an air vent.
Or you can just walk in the front door as an invisible dude
and hope you have enough PowerBars to keep it going.
There's often another option which involves talking your way in
by convincing someone important to let you go.
This brings up a mini-game of sorts
which acts kind of like the one in L.A. Noire,
especially if you have social augmentations.
It's up to you to read the person and direct the conversation to get what you want.
Once you're inside, it's stealth, stealth and more stealth.
If you're caught, you've either got to take the dudes out
or play hide-and-seek until they give up.
Surprisingly, the hiding option works well enough most of the time for me,
perhaps a little too well.
The AI in this game can be stupid.
So very, very stupid.
Maybe "exploitable" is the more proper term here.
You can walk up, shoot a commander in the dick,
then run behind a cardboard box or into a crawl space,
and even though they freaking saw you do it,
they will stop looking for you if you just stay put long enough.
Sure, I know there have to be these kinds of limitations in games like this.
But after you figure out how to exploit these guys' weaknesses with line of sight,
it's a piece of cake and you'll just go through the motions until you reach your goal.
Not to say this isn't still fun, because it is,
but it really does break the immersion when all that's standing between you and a guard
is a freshly stacked pile of crates.
Another thing that's pretty freakin' lame is the boss battles.
For some reason, these exist.
I really have no idea why.
The whole game you're encouraged to be stealthy,
avoid combat.
But then you get thrown into a boss battle
and you have no choice but to kill them.
No branching paths, no other way to do it.
You just have to put them down.
And even if you do so using non-lethal methods,
it still will show a cutscene of them dying.
Way to screw up my idea of Jensen, guys.
Not to mention the battles themselves are cheaper
than a bag of Chinese knockoff army men toys.
They'll kill you within a second or two of direct fire
and they take ages to kill with your guns,
but no worries.
All you'll need to do is spam them with grenades and they'll die.
Of course, if you don't have grenades, you're kind of screwed.
I just don't see how these enhance the game experience at all,
and in fact, they only confuse things and go against
the entire overarching idea of stealth.
Whatever, there's only three of these, and while I got over it, they still pissed me off.
Finally, there's the hacking.
It replaces the old tool-based method in the original Deus Ex
with something much more involved.
It's really a full-fledged puzzle game in itself,
somewhat similar to the game Uplink.
For me, it was kind of hard to wrap my head around it the first couple of times,
but it'll start to make sense soon enough and it becomes old hat.
Basically, you want to capture all the appropriate nodes
before the computer finds your original node.
There are optional things to capture along the way,
like money and special hacking abilities,
so there's a constant risk vs. reward thing going on.
It actually got fun for me eventually,
at least on the PC.
I also played the game on the 360 and it was an absolute bother
to play the hacking mini-game with a controller compared to a mouse.
It wasn't impossible, but I was able to complete the much harder hacks on the PC
with less augmentations than I needed on a console.
And the discrepancy between the PC and the console version doesn't stop there.
The user interface on each system is entirely different,
and once again I'm going to have to side with the PC being superior.
Managing your inventory with a mouse and keyboard
is simply miles better than using a controller.
You also have quicker access to weapons hotkeys on the keyboard,
whereas on the console, you have a radio wheel selector.
Though I have to give the console version some props
because its weapons wheel is totally customizable
and actually really easy to use, which is more than I can say for some games.
There's also the classic quick save/ quick load keys on the PC,
which will save you some menu time,
and you also have the option to type in passwords and keycodes
with the keyboard on the PC,
which is just so much better than clunkily choosing each character with a controller.
You also have excellent mouse controls,
which greatly improves aiming and accuracy with weapons.
I found myself playing entirely different games between the systems,
preferring more precise weapons on the PC
and weapons with less of a need to aim on the 360.
And of course, you'll also get better graphics and loading times on the PC,
and even some DirectX 11 features.
Now don't mishear me; there's nothing wrong with the console version.
But I just have to give credit to a competent PC version of a game when I see it.
Seems like such a rare things these days.
I did run into a couple of game-breaking bugs on the PC version, though,
and they've since been patched, but I still had to restart my game at that point.
Really, really sucked.
Just save your game and save often to be safe, and you should be fine.
The rest of the game is all about the story and atmosphere.
At its heart, this is a story-driven RPG-type game
with branching paths and varying choices to ensure
each playthrough is unique.
I am reminded a bit of games like Mass Effect in this sense,
but at the same time, I'm not.
The game styles overall are completely different,
but you do have that similar feel in the hub cities,
branching stories, skill upgrades and conversation system.
I also get a Metal Gear Solid vibe
with all the stealthing and sneaking and cigarette smoking.
But again, the overall style of the game is very different.
Most of all, Human Revolution reminds me of the original Deus Ex
and that is nothing but a good thing.
Admittedly, the story was a lot better in the original game,
especially the ending,
but the one in Human Revolution does its job well enough,
and keeps you moving forward and wanting to know what happens next and all that stuff.
Most importantly, I still felt like I was playing a Deus Ex game,
with the conspiracy-laden plot line, the memorable characters,
lots of choices that affect the story,
and of course the emphasis on stealth.
And it's all augmented by the graphical style of the game,
which sets the game apart by its use of the color yellow.
Yellow, yellow, yellow.
There's so much freakin' yellow and gold plastered on everything,
you'd think King Midas went outside and sneezed or something.
It's not really a complaint, it's just obvious.
So I guess I really didn't need to mention it at all.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is freakin' awesome.
And at 15 to 30 hours to complete the game,
there's quite a lot to keep you busy.
But it's also flawed in several ways that are really unfortunate.
The boss battles, sometimes ridiculous AI
and a couple of game-breaking bugs annoyed the balls off me.
But I just grabbed my balls and jammed them back into my scrote
and I was just fine because the overall experience is just that good.
The story, the gameplay, the graphics, the music,
the sound and the hooker punching is 95% top notch.
It's irksome that the game comes so close to total greatness and falls short,
but that's the way the rag doll crumbles.
It may not quite live up to the amazingness that was the first Deus Ex,
but Human Revolution comes admirably close, and in my opinion
it is completely worth playing.